Vol. 46:4

The repeated pairing of “evening” and “morning” in Exodus 16:6-12 has long puzzled commentators, who cannot agree on which day the promised theophany and the arrival of quail and manna actually occur. Landau argues that all three occurrences of the word-pair form embedded poetic bicola, and that biblical poetry consistently uses “evening/morning” not for its literal timeframe but as a figurative idiom for a brief, swiftly passing interval — as shown by parallel uses in Psalms, Isaiah, and Genesis. Applying this figurative reading to Exodus 16 dissolves the chronological contradictions that literal readings by Ibn Ezra, Ramban, Malina, and Childs all struggle to resolve, since the entire episode can then be read as unfolding within a single day.

The rare biblical rebuke ‘What is this you have done?’ links Jacob’s discovery that he was married to the wrong sister (Gen. 29:25) to the three wife-sister deception stories of Abraham and Isaac. Kelsey argues that Jacob’s tale deliberately inverts that pattern — sister becomes wife rather than wife becoming sister, and Jacob is the victim of deception rather than its author — while sharing structural features such as travel to a foreign land, dishonesty, and a concluding covenant. The inversion reads as a kind of ancestral poetic justice: just as Jacob once passed himself off as Esau to steal a blessing, Laban’s sibling-switch repays him for his own earlier deception.

Ezekiel twice names a righteous “Daniel” alongside Noah and Job, and once asks the King of Tyre whether he is wiser than Daniel — but the identity of this figure is genuinely unclear. Klein lays out the traditional rabbinic identification with Daniel of the Book of Daniel, the academic identification with Danel of the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat, and a third, largely overlooked option: Daniel/Chileab, King David's little-discussed second son. Weighing the chronological problems, the anomalous spelling of the name without a yod, and the disadvantages of each candidate, the article concludes that no proposed identification is fully satisfying and that Daniel's identity may simply be unrecoverable.

A chemist's assessment of the twelve gemstones set into the High Priest's breastplate (Ex. 28:15-30), working from physical rather than purely philological evidence — hardness, ancient availability, and probable size given the roughly 8-9 inch span of the folded linen. Meschel surveys the identifications offered by the Septuagint, Josephus, Saadia Gaon, Ibn Ezra, and Theophrastus for each of the twelve names, and proposes a table of modern mineralogical best guesses (carnelian, peridot, green feldspar, lapis lazuli, onyx, and others) while candidly acknowledging that no identification can be made with certainty.

A rare but traditional exegetical method reads meaning into the physical shape of Hebrew letters themselves — the closed sides of the bet that opens Genesis, the oversized vav in Vaizata's name in Esther 9:9, the open mem in Nehemiah 2:13's “breached” walls, and the mixed small-and-large peh in Daniel 6:20's account of Darius rising early. Ron traces each interpretation from the Talmud and midrash through medieval commentators such as Ibn Ezra, Radak, Rashi, and Rabbenu Nissim, arguing that the visual form of these anomalous letters was read as a graphic representation of the very content the verse describes — a beam, a breach, a staircase.

Ritzpah, Saul's concubine who guards the impaled bodies of her executed sons in II Samuel 21, is a minor and largely passive figure in the biblical text itself. Apple traces how three English-language poets — William Cullen Bryant, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Henry Kendall — each took up her story and, in doing so, gave her something the Bible withholds: a voice. Tennyson reads the story through Victorian anxieties about madness and bereaved mothers, Bryant recasts her as an articulate, grieving speaker, and Kendall extends her into a metaphor for the mothers of soldiers lost in modern wars, and in each case a Bible woman largely confined to the narrative's margins is pulled into the foreground.

After Pharaoh's refusal and the people's loss of faith in Exodus 5, the mission of Moses and Aaron appears to collapse — yet by Exodus 7:6 it is proceeding smoothly, even though Moses again protests his unsuitability for the task in chapter 6. Spero argues that Exodus 6:13 and 7:1-2 resolve two underlying misunderstandings: first, that Aaron's real role was as Moses' liaison to the suffering Israelites rather than as spokesman to Pharaoh, and second, that Moses himself was meant to speak directly under divine inspiration before Pharaoh's court, with Aaron elucidating as needed, rather than simply having Aaron do the talking.

A report on the 55th annual International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth (Hidon ha-Tanakh), held in Jerusalem on Israel's 70th Independence Day. Ezriel Shilat of Hatzor Haglilit, a former Gaza Strip settler evacuated in 2005, won the title over runner-up Oriah Cohen of Haifa, in a final round of sixteen contestants drawn from Israel and seven other countries. Adler describes the contest's format — video-question rounds, pre-contest tours of biblical sites, and meetings with government leaders — and the organizations, including the Jewish Agency and the IDF, that sponsor it each year.